Sunday, January 7, 2018

And a Happy New Year!

We have a little problem around our house of apple cores being left everywhere. If we are lucky we find them while they are fresh. If we are unlucky we find them when they have been mummified, or, worse (which, fortunately, almost never happens), shrouded a fluffy layer of mold. I know that the Knight children are abnormally addicted to apples, but the core problem is getting out of hand. One night I left the kids this note:

There is no chance whatsoever that my children are being screwed up by my parenting. Ha! They all laughed and threw their apple cores away for exactly one day. Now, whenever anyone finds a gross apple core, they start screaming, "Walter! Walter! Who has lost a hand?!" But then they just shift themselves away from the nasty apple core and leave it where it is. We might need to take a break from apples around here until the clean up genes mature a little bit.
I've probably said how much I love our library system before, but it has really outdone itself this winter. Because there was no story time during the break from school, and our schedule was a little bit funny, we picked different times to go to the library. Not once, but twice we showed up at the library just as a program was beginning that was age appropriate for these children. The first one, the week before Christmas, was a Christmas carol sing along, accompanied by ukuleles. This time, even though we were on a pretty tight schedule, we stayed for "Toy Wars," which was a middle aged man acting out the story of the three good Star Wars movies with his original toys from the 70s and 80s when the movies came out. This could have been really bad, but our librarians don't do bad, so we gave it a shot. It was HILARIOUS. Even Sammy, who was well below the recommended age for the program, stayed interested the whole time. When the original toys had been misplaced or broken, the presenter filled in with other objects. I was dying when Darth Vader showed up for the first time on a big toy Washington State Ferry. I was glad we stayed, even though we only had half an hour to grab our groceries afterwards.

B's Christmas wish, besides those Christmas socks, which Santa delivered, and he wears every day, was to have a date with Mom and Dad, while the other kids stayed behind with a babysitter. We scheduled a babysitter and took B to the movies, as he requested. We went to see "Ferdinand." We had popcorn and candy, and B got to sit between us basking in the attention of both of his parents at the same time. He was all aglow. We may have to do this again on the rare special occasion.

I got an electric blanket from my in-laws for Christmas. Thanks guys! This is the best thing since I talked Todd into flannel sheets when we moved to Washington. It's king sized to fit our bed, and the two sides have different heat controls! Sammy is in love with everything fuzzy and soft, so he likes to shed his pants and luxuriate in my heated blanket. Because he is potty training, he sheds his pants quite often. Normally he is very fastidious about being fully clothed, but now he has to take at least a minute with the heated blanket every time his pants come off for anything, which is usually about once an hour.

Grandpa Michael left his truck in our driveway while he went with Naomi, his wife, to the Olympic Peninsula for a couple of days around New Year's. While we were outside enjoying our dryer than usual December, B and Sammy thought that the truck was the greatest for playing in.

We had a very low key New Year's Celebration, all by ourselves since it was a Sunday evening. We celebrated with Buenos Aires, which is at 7 p.m. our time. This way the kids got to stay up a little bit late, but not so late that they fell apart.

We went out into the cold to make a lot of noise with poppers, and then we bundled the bambinos off to bed. Todd and I both meant to get to bed before midnight, too, but we got so absorbed in what we were doing before bed that we both accidentally stayed up. Todd was playing games online with his friends, and I was trying to catch up on this blog that I fell ages behind on while I was in school fall semester.

It was nice to have a really low key holiday after all of the bustle and travel of 2017.
Eloise and I had a date on New Year's Day. We went to the park, which was absolutely freezing, and then we got oreos at the store to take home and share.